Searching for the Higgs boson with tau leptons in ATLAS
| Date/Time: | Wednesday, 07 Dec 2011 from 4:10 pm to 5:10 pm |
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| Location: | A401, Zaffarano Hall |
| Contact: | Chunhui Chen |
| Phone: | 515-294-5062 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
The Higgs boson is the last missing piece of the Standard Model and figures prominently in the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking that gives mass to fundamental particles. Having recorded over 5 fb-1 of data in 2011 and with more to come in 2012, the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider is at the brink of discovering the Higgs boson or excluding its existence. I will review the current status of the Higgs search in ATLAS and then focus on the search for the Higgs decay to two tau leptons. As current results favor a light Higgs with mass below 140 GeV/c2, this channel will play an important role if it is indeed discovered in studying its decay branching fractions and uncovering possible relationships to physics beyond the Standard Model, with promising sensitivity to spin and charge-parity properties. I will also discuss some previous tracking-based results from ATLAS that show the performance of the detector and the Monte Carlo simulation.